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Description
Neutral helium multiplets, HeI*{lambda}{lambda}3189, 3889, 10830, are very useful diagnostics for the geometry and physical conditions of the absorbing gas in quasars. So far only a handful of HeI* detections have been reported. Using a newly developed method, we detected the HeI*{lambda}3889 absorption line in 101 sources of a well-defined sample of 285 MgII broad absorption line (BAL) quasars selected from SDSS DR5. This has increased the number of HeI* BAL quasars by more than one order of magnitude. We further detected HeI*{lambda}3189 in 50% (52/101) of the quasars in the sample. The detection fraction of HeI* BALs in MgII BAL quasars is ~35% as a whole, and it increases dramatically with increasing spectral signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), from ~18% at S/N<=10 to ~93% at S/N>=35. This suggests that HeI* BALs could be detected in most MgII LoBAL quasars, provided the spectra S/N is high enough. Such a surprisingly high HeI* BAL fraction is actually predicted from photoionization calculations based on a simple BAL model. The result indicates that HeI* absorption lines can be used to search for BAL quasars at low z, which cannot be identified by ground-based optical spectroscopic surveys with commonly seen UV absorption lines. Using HeI*{lambda}3889, we discovered 19 BAL quasars at z<0.3 from the available SDSS spectral database. The fraction of HeI* BAL quasars is similar to that of LoBAL objects.
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